Customer Reviews

Danger's Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Where "Danger's Hour" succeeds is wholly in the human element, describing relationships among Americans and Japanese combatants. Undoubtedly that aspect will find favor among generalist readers and reviewers who care little about ships, aircraft, or history.

Sailors, aviators and historians: stand by to be repelled.

Mr. Kennedy knows almost nothing of his core subject: naval aviation. There are literally scores of errors that would have been avoided by competent fact checkers. For instance, we are told that Admiral Marc Mitscher learned to fly "soon after graduating from Annapolis" and became Naval Aviator Number 17. Actually, he was No. 33 six years after graduating. That information is readily available in a casual Internet search.

Basic chronology of the Pacific War is too often muffed, with overlapping accounts of events 1942-43 and again in 1944-45. The Guadalcanal campaign is especially convoluted.

Kennedy's attempts at describing aviation matters inevitably fail. He has bombs attached to Corsairs' landing gear (!) and his description of the Mitsubishi Zero defies explanation. His effort to explain aerodynamics becomes unfathomable.

Nor is he better with nautical subjects. Throughout, the book refers to a ship's "tunnels" (presumably passageways), "ceilings", and "hanger decks." The naval term "head" is properly used once amid "bathrooms," "restrooms," and "lavatories."

Historical facts take repeated hits. Allegedly Vice Admiral Ozawa took four carriers to Leyte Gulf without aircraft or escorts. We are told that Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay refused to send B-29s against kamikaze bases, then we read multiple accounts that state otherwise. (In truth, XXI Bomber Command diverted from Japanese industrial targets to airfields in support of the Okinawa invasion.) A Marine pilot, then-Captain James Swett, is repeatedly cited as "Colonel" when in fact he gained that rank 20 years later.

The final manuscript still requires editing. Grammatical errors abound, especially mixing subjects and pronouns. ("Japan was devastated; they had almost no fuel.") Furthermore, the author unnecessarily inserts himself into the narrative: "Mr. X told me" rather than merely "Mr. X said..."

The publicity promoting "Danger's Hour" often descends into puffery. A noted scholar proclaims that kamikazes remain "one of the little known aspects of WW II." Another statement says that VE-Day in Europe, five weeks previously, has overshadowed Bunker Hill's story for 65 years. (Actually, the Navy released the news a month later.) The promotional material even states that Bunker Hill's survival "proved crucial to Allied victory" though she never returned to service.

This is pretty poor stuff, especially since the story has stood on its own merit since 1945. Yet 21st century values sometimes are imposed upon WW II subjects. No better example exists than the assertion that all Bunker Hill fliers were "challenged by the guilt of homicide." Not some, not most--all of them. (This reviewer has known many Bunker Hill aviators and not one ever expressed such maudlin sentiments.)

The debrief: though "Danger's Hour" receives credit for an innovative, ambitious approach, it may charitably be characterized as inadequate. That's a shame: properly executed, it could have been magnificent.

Two stars.

The story of the Essex class fast carriers of TF58/TF38 is one that deserves telling. That the ships of the Big Blue Team bore the brunt of combat at sea in the Pacific War is unquestioned. Books like the "Big E" and the "Little Giants" are well-written expositions of fact combined with personal stories that illuminate the subject and are timeless. Telling the whole story of the Essex class in general, and the tragic story of the USS Bunker Hill in particular, would be a welcome addition to the available literature .

Unfortunately, this is not that book.

It is a disorganized mass of inaccurate, convoluted, virtually unreadable gibberish.

The most mundane facts regarding the US Navy, its ships and aircraft as well as those of the Japanese Empire are unknown to this author.

The editors, fact checkers and other support staff at Simon and Schuster who allowed this incredibly bad imitation of a history to be published should be fired, now.

I have read the 5 star reviews of this book on this site and have concluded that they must have read a different book than I did, or did not read it at all. I did read it all, and wished I had not done so.

Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, billed as an Associate Scholar with an interest in maritime history at the John Carter Brown Library, a Center for Advanced Research in History and the Humanities at Brown University, has an interesting idea in DANGER'S HOUR, to juxtapose the parallel stories of an Essex-class aircraft carrier, the USS Bunker Hill, with that of Kiyoshi Ogawa, a Japanese student conscript who is ultimately 'volunteered' for the kamikaze corps. These parallel stories intersect on May 11, 1945, when Ogawa and his wingman crashed into the USS Bunker Hill, killing and injuring over 700 men, and knocking the Bunker Hill out of the war for the duration.

There is only one major problem: Kennedy isn't much of an historian and, if anything, a worse writer.

Other reviewers have already detailed the many factual gaffes sprinkled throughout the book's pages. There are plenty others--the two typhoons that saved Japan from the Mongols were in 1274 and 1281, not 1281 and 1284. Equally disturbing, the book is replete with numerous seeming inconsistencies. For example, on page 337, two aviators are described as "crawl[ing] across the deck, trying to keep their heads and bodies below the level of flying debris" to get to two nearby planes. Yet on the very next page the same two pilots "together leapt up from the catwalk and sprinted to the Avengers. After retrieving both raft containers, they raced back across the flight deck...." Crawl or sprint--which is it? On page 205 Kennedy describes the final aerial assault on Japan's super battleship, the Yamato, as the approaching torpedo pilots skim above the water. As they close in, antiaircraft fire lights up the sky. Every enemy ship is firing "their AA guns flashing white as the antiaircraft fire hurled skyward." How will this prevent the attack when the enemy is approaching, as Kennedy states, at 60 feet above the waves?

These kinds of flaws and inconsistencies could have (and should have) been caught by a good editor, or any editor. What is perhaps harder to fix is Kennedy's writing style--it is not simply bad--it is awful. The tortured circumlocutions, the fractured phraseology, are the verbal equivalent of nails being scratched across a chalkboard. In one Japanese attack, the nearby USS Enterprise "was near-missed four times." (p. 214). Because the Japanese government was leery of "obliterating all freedom of thought," college students "were given more freedom of thought than any other group in Japan." (p. 86). One can only wonder how freedom of thought is 'given' to anyone (or obliterated for that matter), let alone how a ship is 'near-missed.' After student conscripts are told they will become kamikazes, they blow off their frustration by rampaging through town, "cutting their way through the...doors of frail restaurants...." (p. 186). A door may be frail, but an entire restaurant? Burning badly, the Bunker Hill's captain attempts to clear the decks: "Seitz would use what was then called centrifugal force to tip the ship, and push everything out." (p. 351). What is centrifugal force now called, pray tell? The author even manages to take a simple idea, and convolute the sentence until it yields up an entirely unexpected meaning: "They made their way twenty-five feet below the waterline of a vessel that many thought was sinking into one of the engineering rooms." (p. 378). Where was the vessel heading? Again, where was the editor? I could go on, but you get the idea.

Kennedy's prose is often the purplish/overwrought style more typical of a junior high school term paper. Nights are "unimaginably dark," beaches are "staggeringly beautiful," blasts are "impossibly loud," flare-ups are of "staggering brightness," one suicide crash dive is described as "sibylline," the meaning of which wholly escaped this reviewer. Kennedy's favorite action words, however, are 'annihilate,' and especially 'obliterate.' Domestic political freedoms are 'annihilated' by the military junta during the Taisho dynasty (p. 30). The Bunker Hill's pilots annihilate the Japanese in every confrontation (p. 165). Better yet, the Yamato isn't simply sunk, it is obliterated (all 70,000 tons of it); freedom of thought itself is in danger of being obliterated (as noted above); indeed, within a nine-page span (pp. 292-301), Kennedy describes a kamikaze pilot, a mule tractor, the two men operating it, the deck edge elevator, and a hapless sailor closing down a hatch, as all having been obliterated. (Since obliterate typically means to destroy completely, leaving no trace, it is somewhat oxymoronic for Kennedy to caption one of his photos "note the obliterated mule tractor....") As a final example of the clumsy wording (and dubious historical analysis), which epitomizes the entire book, consider Kennedy's final judgment on the Japanese war effort: "One reason that Japanese imperialism failed so severely [?] is probably that the Japanese, perhaps more than any other nationality, intensely dislike living outside their home country." (p. 258). Try telling that to the inhabitants of Tinian and Saipan and those of Manchuria, who had been living under Japanese overlords since the 1920s and the 1930s, respectively.

As some other reviewers have suggested, many of the five-star reviews follow a suspiciously similar story line. In the interests of full disclosure, some of these reviewers (at least 12 by my count---Caslin, Gillespie, Campbell, Riva, Idler, Reiss, Meyer, Wilcox, Falanga, Soll, Freeman, Ward and Binder (twice)) should have mentioned that they all received a shout-out from Kennedy in his acknowledgements section --some for having "helped,"---hardly the source of a disinterested review (all, not surprising, gave the book five stars). What is harder to fathom, however, is what influenced people like Doris Kearns Goodwin and others to lavish their praises on this book---clearly they did not read the same book I did.

One hopes that the next time Kennedy has a good idea and an urge to write US history, he will hire not one, but two, editors---one to clean up the factual errors and another to eliminate (or, obliterate, if you will) the writing faux pas that he seems prone to. Perhaps then a worthy book will emerge. I'll take a pass.

This book takes a major hit on the facts. I'm not sure if it was poor research, bad fact checking or just plain old fashioned bad editing.

It seemed that there was a major fact error every other page....It got so bad that I only read the first 180 pages, had to put it down and then returned it to the bookstore and got a refund.

I'll just site 4 very bad mistakes. There were so many that I can not list all of them in just this short review.

1. He attributes the Japanese loss of 4 carriers at Midway to mistakes made by Yamamoto the commander Combined Fleet. Any person with even a modest amount of knowledge about WWII knows that Nagumo had tactical command of the carrier task force at Midway and it was his decisions about ordinance that delayed the 2nd strike and therefore the carriers were caught with their CAP chasing the US torpedo attack surviviors.

2. He refers to a pilot named John Dixon (or Hixon?) as an Avenger pilot while describing the Battle of Coral Sea. The Avenger's debut was at Midway a month later and only in small numbers as part of the Island defense force.

3. He stated that the Bunker Hill was sold for scrap in 1989 and was the last of the Essex Class carriers. He was wrong on 2 points with that statement. It was sold for scrap in 1973 after being decomissioned in 1966 (source is Danfs). The last Essex Class carrier was to my knowledge the Lexington and was either deactivated or sold for scrap in 1991!!!!

4. The most egregious was that he stated the Japanese had forknowledge of the amphibious operation against Leyte because they were warned by......wait for it......The Soviet Union!!!!!! Japan's traditional enemy.

Regarding #4...there is a problem with this statement and many statements throughout the book, there are no notes citing the source!!! Did he just decide to make up facts on the fly to get the book out for the Holidays?

He can't even get the 1st commander of the Bunker Hill correct. It was not George Seitz but J.J. Ballentine. I may be spelling his last name incorrectly.

This was without question one of the worst books I have ever read on a WWII subject.

I returned this thing to the store and got my [...] bucks back and bought a movie.

Maxwell Taylor Kennedy's book about the kamikaze attack on the USS BUNKER HILL is a powerful and arresting account of World War II. Kennedy has done his homework and his research is impressive. He based this book on work in the National Archives, using after-action reports and log books, but also interviews with surviving crewmen. The problem with oral histories done many years later is that they often give the survivors a larger voice than they might otherwise deserve just because they survived. Kennedy compensates for this glitch by becoming a historian/detective. He contacted the families of many deceased members of the crew and got access to their letters and diaries. The result is an account that is informative and reads well.

Kennedy also interviewed a number of kamikaze alumni and shows--quite rightly--that none of them were crazy monsters or suicidal fanatics. He manages to give the other side, humanity and develops their point of view, something which is often lacking in English-language studies of the Pacific Theater. His argument that the ship and the kamikazes represent two different ways of war is exaggerated, and distorts more than it helps. He is, however, dead on the mark when he contends that the Japanese suicide pilots offer lessons important and relevant to the Long War/Global War on Terrorism. By comparing the accounts, records, and/or artifacts of American and Japanese participants in this kamikaze campaign, Kennedy even manages to indentify the pilot that slammed into the BUNKER HILL, Ensign Ogawa Kiyoshi. Using interviews with Ogawa's friends and family, he gives his readers a personality sketch of a reluctant kamikaze. This type of material is fresh and new, but since Kennedy must depend on others to explain Ogawa, the pilot never emerges as a fully developed personality.

The book becomes much stronger when it comes to the actual attack. Kennedy's coverage is detailed. The photographs that litter the text are one of the most striking parts of this book. Kennedy pulls no punches and includes images of dead Americans. The bodies in these illustrations are often in bad shape, which brings home the real nature of war. Drawings of the ship and its compartments in the inside of the binding/cover are an important addition.

Readers looking for a good account of the War in the Pacific will enjoy this entertaining and informative read.

I grew up in the shadow of the USS Bunker Hill. My dad, now in his 80's, served aboard the Bunker Hill and survived that awful day. When I was growing up, my dad never volunteered any information about that day, and answered my questions about it with great reluctance and only in a very general way. It was only recently that I found out that recalling the attack on the Bunker Hill gave him nightmares. Only once did he mention a specific incident associated with the attack--the image of dead pilots stacked like cordwood in the burned-out briefing compartment. That image haunted me for years, and I now know that it haunted him too. My dad went on to serve for 26 years and three wars. I enlisted in the Navy on the same day he retired. A couple of years later, as I was flying in to North Island Naval Air Station, I noticed an Essex-class carrier tied up at the north end of the island. It was the USS Bunker Hill, long-since decommissioned and being used as some sort of electronics laboratory. She has since been scrapped. Since my own retirement, I have been a voracious reader of the naval campaign in the Pacific, always on the lookout for references to the USS Bunker Hill. I recently found and read a copy of "Danger's Hour."

Reading the first half of the book is like walking around with a pebble in your shoe. It is written as if it was hurriedly thrown together. Some of the paragraphs are disjointed and repetitive. There are several factual errors, mostly of a trivial nature but irritating nonetheless to a Navy man. The editing seemed sloppy. It almost seems as if the author was trying to hurry through the first half of the book in order to get to the real heart of the matter -- the first-person accounts.

The last half of the book -- the first-person accounts -- are what makes this book a good read. It fills in the gaps of a story that my dad was reluctant to discuss. The heart-wrenching accounts, coupled with graphic photographs of dead sailors, explain my dad's recurring nightmares. But they also profoundly awe the reader with tales of sacrifice and heroism, of devotion to duty and devotion to one's shipmates. It draws a clear distinction, for me at least, in the concept of self-sacrifice as an element of national policy (the Japanese kamikazi pilots) and the individual sacrifice of American sailors for country, ship and shipmates.

This book is a very easy read, and it succeeds in conveying the drama and danger aboard the Bunker Hill, but I have to agree with some of the other reviewers who assert that the author spent more time interviewing and less time fact checking.

Perhaps the most compelling errors that I noticed involved the Bunker Hill's engineering. Kennedy asserts that the boilers used SALT WATER to propel the ship and that they burned Diesel fuel. No steam ship of the modern era used either. He also calls the firemen in the boiler rooms "Boilermakers." Later, he states that USS Wilkes-Barre emitted a "Diesel Boom" while it was engaged in picking up survivors from Bunker Hill. What the heck is that?

So- what is accurate in this book and what isn't?

do not buy this book. I am very well read in Military Hisory esp. WW II and Danger's Hour is one of the worst I've come across in a long time. many facts are repeated in various iterations, with glaring inaccuracy such as stating newly trained naval aviators had 2000 flight hours when they were posted to their first assignment, stating pilots wore orange kapok filled mae west life jackets[Kennedy should look at the photos in his book, they wear self inflating rubber life vests, in fact there were never any orange life vest in the navy in WWII, they were dark blue and were for shipboard sailors. On page 289 "bank hard around the starboard port quarter" which makes no sense, it's like saying he banked hard around right left quarter? He talks about 20mm double Bofors cannon, unfortunately it is 40mm. after the bunker hill was struck "the water was full of black oil and mud" where does mud come from in the middle of an ocean? The factual and time line errors go on and on. I have never read a history book with so many errors. the writer is sloppy with the facts, did poor research, a fact checker total unfamiliar with WWII facts and history, and an incompetent editor. Do not buy this book. It is a total waste of money.

As a long-time military history and WWII buff, I looked forward to reading "Danger's Hour." However, I was appalled at the incredible number of factual errors in the book. It is written amateurishly and it appears that the editors didn't contribute to improving the original manuscript. As a book author myself, I know how valuable it is to have a good editor to clean up the text, correct grammatical errors, and point out factual mistakes. The number of errors and the sloppy writing in "Danger's Hour" makes me skeptical about the accuracy of the entire contents. That is, I find mistakes that I know about, but can I trust the rest of the contents to be accurate? I doubt it. This book was a real disappointment to me, considering the significance of the historical events being addressed.

the story of the bunker hill and the kamikazi pilots is fascinating and heart wrenching, but i really wasn't impressed at all with this author. the subject matter could at times be a little dry ( the details of how the ship was built and how it worked), so it didn't help that he has a disorganized style of writing and often repeats himself - sometimes repeating himself just a paragraph later. i found myself reading this exciting story, but wishing someone else had written it.